Latino leaders visit Athens immigrant enclave

On Tuesday, Latino leaders from across the state gathered in Athens, where they visited an immigrant enclave to learn about the work of a local nonprofit – and learned about the toll that a recent killing on the campus of the University of Georgia has taken on the local Hispanic community.

After it was known that the man charged in the Feb. 22 slaying of a 22-year-old nursing student was a Venezuelan immigrant, Sister Uyen-chi Dang says her “heart sank.”

Dang helps run a Catholic after-school day care program in a neighborhood that she says is mostly made up of undocumented immigrants from Latin America.

“There was a sense of fear,” Dang said of the immediate aftermath of the killing, with residents worrying about an anti-immigrant backlash.

Her audience on Tuesday were members of the Latinx Alliance, a coalition of Latino leaders that has come together in regular meetings since 2021 to learn about the needs of Hispanic and immigrant communities across the state.

The Alliance “is at a very high level focused on what can we do to contribute to the well-being of our community, and lift up our community in good, positive ways,” said Frank Fernandez, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, and a Latinx Alliance leader.

“The purpose of these visits when … is to go into different cities, different communities, across the state to better understand what is happening for Latinos in that community, because they are not all the same.”

The Latinx Alliance’s Athens visit was scheduled before the city became a searing-hot flashpoint in the national immigration debate. In Fernandez’s view, the timing presented “an opportunity to really try to support the local community, given the backlash.”

The UGA killing “has become very politicized and weaponized … and the thing that people don’t fully internalize is that now it has all kind of implications for many people that shouldn’t be caught up in this.”

He added: “And that’s the bottom line of why we’re here, it’s ‘What can we do to be helpful?’ Because we got to work together.”

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